I tried that, but the Rust build process was too painful, and agents seemed to burn a lot of tokens guessing how to get the code to compile. I rewrote my project in Elixir and it’s been going much more smoothly
I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position
I could not agree less. People used to call Python “executable pseudocode” - in that spirit, Haskell is executable pseudo-math. If you’ve done enough higher math that a professor’s whiteboard notation feels natural to you, then Haskell might feel like a reasonable approximation of that style. Otherwise: it’s line noise.
it was kind of a miracle that it held together as well as it did pre-Microsoft. I think to some degree, they got lucky, and were able to coast on being in the right place at the right time. And then because they were so central they attracted some amazing talent who managed to keep the thing scaling up _despite_ the culture.
This is just CRDT merges and better diffs?? I think the future of version control is much, much weirder than this. Like if you have CRDTs why not have ephemeral branches with real-time collaborative editing and live CI as you type
one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?
and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined
but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads
it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most.
Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off
I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)
but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try
we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).
But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
I was wondering when I’d see someone try this! I started work on a very similar idea last year but kept getting distracted by weirder and weirder ideas along the way, and never shipped anything. So, bravo!